Drafting ordinary heroes

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George Pelecanos' world is a hope-deprived Washington
DC, writes Michael Gawenda.

The two-storey white-painted suburban timber house in the quiet
side street off the main highway in Silver Spring, which is the
home of crime writer George Pelecanos, is far from imperial
Washington.

Out here, on the border between Washington DC and Maryland,
there are no monuments, no sweeping squares, no statues, galleries,
memorials and museums that mark Washington's history and that
reflect America's power and influence, its undeniable
greatness.

Out here are narrow streets with no footpaths and slightly
shabby houses on small blocks and a mixture of white, black and
Latino faces that tells you this place is unique in the region: it
is truly multi-ethnic.

In Washington there are black neighbourhoods and Asian
neighbourhoods and Latino neighbourhoods. And then there's white
Washington, which is mainly middle-class and lives either in the
renovated terraces of inner-city DC or out in green-belt suburbs of
Virginia, Maryland and Arlington.

Washington DC, which remains two-thirds African- American and
where 97 per cent of the public school population is black, is the
setting for the crime novels that have won George Pelecanos
numerous awards and regular appearances on the Washington
Post best-seller list.

They have also attracted some sharp criticism.

That's because Pelecanos, who grew up the son of Greek
immigrants in Silver Spring, where he still lives, just up the road
from his childhood home, writes about black Washington.

That is controversial enough for a white writer, but his black
Washington is not the burgeoning black middle class living out in
their own, self-chosen segregated suburbs across the Potomac in
Prince Georges County.

Pelecanos' world is the crime-ridden, drug-infested,
violence-prone, hope-deprived black Washington in the shadow of
Capitol Hill, adjacent to the renovated suburbs of inner-city DC
that once were black neighbourhoods but are now full of mainly
childless Washington political pretenders.

All 13 of his books, including his latest, Drama City,
are set in the mean streets of black Washington. His books are
marked by dialogue that is almost a different language, the
language of violence, of the gangs and drug dealers and petty
criminals.

So when Pelecanos comes to the front door of his renovated
two-storey white house in this quiet Silver Spring street, it is
slightly disconcerting to be greeted by a softly spoken man with a
slightly lilting southern accent, neatly dressed in jeans and denim
shirt whose smile speaks of embarrassment at having to talk about
himself.

For a writer whose fictional world is full of characters who
live lives of unquiet desperation, who are either destined for an
early violent death or are struggling against the odds for some
sort of redemption, he has led a remarkably sheltered life.

Pelecanos has never lived outside Washington; indeed, home has
always been somewhere near where he grew up, went to school and
college, and where he lives with his wife and three adopted
children.

"My parents live down the road and I see them every day," he
says. "I could never move away, even if I wanted to - and I don't -
because they need me and I need to be around for them.

"I still go to the same church in which I was baptised and my
sons will be baptised there as well. I love the continuity of that.
But I also cannot imagine living anywhere else but Washington."

Pelecanos is 48 and did not start writing until he was in his
early 30s, having spent his childhood and teenage years working
first in his father's cafe in downtown Washington, then other cafes
around Washington and later selling shoes and clothing in various
department stores.

It was in the cafes, he says, that he first fell in love with
the language of black Washington and where he developed his ear for
the sharp, fast-paced, often brutal dialogue that has led some
critics to compare him to Elmore Leonard.

"I didn't read much when I was young," he says. "I started
reading in my 20s, crime fiction mainly, people like Raymond
Chandler and Mickey Spillane and then writers like John
Steinbeck.

"What I loved about these writers was that their books were full
of ordinary people, people I thought I knew. Most American books
are about winners, people with money, middle-class people.

"Crime fiction seemed like people's literature to me. I wasn't
really interested in crime but in people, ordinary people living in
extreme conditions. I like books that have a plot and move forward,
but the crime aspect is the least important thing to me.

"It's not what is done that I'm interested in but why. Why do
these kids end up selling drugs and dying? Why are their lives full
of violence? That's what I'm interested in."

That there are two Washingtons, the powerful one that in some
ways is the centre of the world, and the other, a drug-fuelled
hopelessness, is reinforced every day in the pages of the
Washington Post.

The front part of the paper is for the powerful and those
aspiring to be, full of reports of what is happening in Congress
and in the White House and in the lobbying outfits that drive so
much of what happens.

In the Metro section, which covers local news, there are
the daily small-news items that mark the overnight murders and
assaults and drive-by shootings and drug and gang attacks that are
part of everyday life in some black neighbourhoods.

"Look where the Post publishes those stories," says
Pelecanos. "If it happens in black neighbourhoods, the stories are
always buried in the Metro section. The kids who are killed
get one or two paragraphs.

Murders, drive-by shootings, little kids shot by accident. Two
paragraphs. What's the message here? The message to these kids is
that their lives don't matter.

"If you are a young kid reading these stories, you are being
told that white life has more value than black life and that people
with money are worth more than people without it."

Pelecanos is not a "mystery" crime writer, his narratives driven
more by the often random violence and hopelessness that afflict his
drug-sellers and young, casually violent gang members, many of
whom, despite the horror of the world in which they live, are still
open to redemption.

In Drama City a former drug-gang member, just released
from jail, gets a job working for the Humane Society - Washington's
equivalent of the RSPCA - travelling the city checking out reports
of cruelty to animals.

As he travels the city, witnessing the cruelty that some humans
are capable of inflicting on their animals, he is "saved" by the
work, though his former life is always there, beckoning him,
drawing him back.

His parole officer is as damaged as he is, deeply unhappy,
alcohol addicted, capable only of "stranger sex" as a way of
momentarily relieving her loneliness.

These two main characters move in a world in which the young are
likely to die through violence before they are middle-aged, where
single mothers struggle to keep their children away from the gangs
that are the only form of family for many, and where it is an act
of heroism to have relationships, have children, form families.

Pelecanos spent three weeks with Humane Society officers
watching them work, plus time with parole officers dealing with
ex-convicts who more often than not find life on the outside harder
than life in jail.

He also spent weeks attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings on
the south-east and north-east of DC, where drug addicts and
ex-convicts came to attempt to rebuild their lives.

"These meetings were the real key to this book," he says. "I sat
there listening to these people's stories and I saw the heroism of
what they are doing. When you go to these meetings you meet people
who are unemployed, drug addicted, with nothing to look forward
to.

"So it's a heroic act what they are doing. And listening to
their stories was inspirational."

The review of Drama City in the Washington Post
accused Pelecanos of reinforcing stereotypes of black people as
"ignorant, slovenly or an addict ...

There are only losers trying to cut their losses," writes
reviewer Guy Johnson. "Pelecanos draws his characters so broadly
that he describes none of them adequately. This in turn creates
doubt about whether he knows his subjects well enough to capture
them."

In other words, what would a middle-class white man know about
the lives of black people and what sort of arrogance does it take
for him to think he can offer any special insight into this
world?

Pelecanos says that the review hurt him and made him angry
because it misrepresented his book.

"He accused me of racism," he said. "My books are not about
black stereotypes at all, but about the struggles of ordinary
people to rise above the often dreadful hand that fate has dealt
them.

"I have two adopted sons, both black. What should I tell them
about this accusation that I stereotype black people. It's not
true."

In reality, Pelecanos is an old-fashioned moralist, angry about
injustice and hypocrisy, interested in the various, often almost
miraculous ways people who seem to have no future, can find
redemption.

He says that he is "committing commercial suicide" by writing
books about black life in America.

"Americans don't want that, aren't ready for that," he says.
"They are ready for sitcoms with funny blacks and stuff where
blacks play the fool, but not for real life drama where blacks have
daily struggles."

Yet his books sell well - though neither he nor his publicist
seemed to know just how well - and his novel Right as Rain
is to be made into a film by producer Curtis Hanson, with Denzel
Washington in the lead role.

"I'm not complaining," he says. "All I'm saying is that I reject
the suggestion that I am exploiting black people in order to write
books that will sell. I write about the part of Washington that
I've known since I was a kid. It's the Washington that happens to
be mainly black. But it's the Washington that I love and care
about. It's the Washington I will never leave."

George P. Pelecanos

1957 Born, Washington, DC1992 A Firing Offense1993Nick's Trip1994Shoedog1995Down By The River Where The Dead Men
Go1996The Big Blowdown. Winner,
International Crime Novel of the Year award in France, Germany and
Japan.1996 Film producer, Caught1997 King Suckerman1998The Sweet Forever1998 Film producer, Whatever1999 Film producer, Blackmale.2000Shame the Devil2001Right As Rain2002Hell To Pay, winner of Los Angeles
Times Book Award.2005Drama City